Well, there *is* honest journalism. You just have to search very long.

Seriously, I think this is a “collateral” of the government form republic. Since public opinion is so important for elections, every political party/adherents etc. have an interest to make their own political decisions look good, no matter whether that’s true. Journalists who do not feel strongly about politics shy away from that topic because it can be dangerous for your career. & people who *do* feel strongly about politics fire journalists that don’t share their opinion.

We would need something like a representative board for public media that is determined by chance/a lottery.

@ Charlie Spencer:
I’m pretty sure it was inspired by the whole “PEWDIEPIE IS A NAZI” drama. If you don’t know about it, Pewdiepie made some offensive jokes about jews, and Wall Street Journal started calling him a Nazi Hero.

@ Charlie Spencer:
It’s a bit of a mess, so hold onto your butt, it’s time for an indeterminately long textwall.

Assuming I’ve paid enough attention to know what’s gone on, it started when Pewdiepie (Felix, for sake of brevity) makes a video wherein he puts money down on a “Pay us $5 and we’ll say anything” livestream(?), and asks them with his $5 to say something like “Hail Hitler” or “Kill jews”.

End results:
5-dollar guys say the thing, Felix reacts to the thing on HIS video, the internet reacts to both things with outrage. 5-dollar guys reply “Wait, we didn’t know what this meant, English isn’t our first language”, Felix makes a video to reply “Okay, I may have gone too far, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to offend, I didn’t expect them to do actually it,” and then the mess ends, some people forgiving while other people hating Felix forever. The end.

…except it’s not, because like a month or so later, the Wall Street Journal gets involved and makes a “Pewdiepie is Facist Anti-Semetic Nazi Supporter” story about the mess. The article reaches Youtube and Disney, and both of who cut ties with Felix in response. Felix makes a rebuttal video to the WSJ, saying “Guys, I’m not anti-Semetic or a Nazi” and ends it with a satirical “Well, I don’t want to, but since the WSJ says I am, I guess I’m a Nazi now [dons SS garb, watches Hitler speech]” skit.

I don’t know which comes when, but WSJ then makes another article and an “evidence compilation video”, the former referencing Youtube/Disney’s reaction to the FIRST article as proof the initial claim was legit(?), and the latter showing off any/all Nazi or Hitler jokes they could find, including footage from Felix’s apology and “I am not a Nazi guys” videos (I detest the phrase ‘cherry-picking’, but if the author sat through both of those to find clips that could out-of-context fit the angle they were after, I don’t know what else to call it).

As an aside, somewhere along the way some ACTUAL neo-nazi website proceeds to parody the whole thing by switching between calling themselves “The #1 Pewdiepie fansite” and “The #1 WSJ fansite”. Confused angry people ensues.

So THEN it ends, with some people up in arms against both Felix and anybody who doesn’t immediately denounce him as scum on the one side, and people either decrying such knee-jerk hate OR asking for people to stop treating others like subhumans (ironic) on the other side.

This is, partially, a fault of the viewers themselves. When was the last time you clicked on an article with a topic that did not interest or contrast your view? And if nothing of interest happened yesterday, well, you still need something to present to your customers.

“PewDiePie is a nazi” “Trump wants to start WW3. Bad!” “The EU is the 4th German Reich. PROOF!” “Find out here what these ungrateful Greeks own!” “9/11 was an inside job” “Black “refugees” rape innocent German blonde” “Doctors hate this guy’s trick!” “Erdogan is the best guy 4EVER”

You want it, you get it. And I think neither an official department for truth nor relying on alternative sources of information or even alternative facts can change that.
(Did I manage to offend anyone with the headlines?)

DoubleGameBro only drowned, skinned and cooked a kitten literally once for the purposes of a joke video. And you all got trolled into believing he does it everyday. So now you’re trying to smear the reputation of a good person who never did anything wrong.

@ Charlie Spencer:
He’s one of the youtube celebrities, Relatively Mainstream Let’s Player and producer on Youtube Red. Generally when you make money in youtube you join certain companies for certain benefits and protections. The one he was a part of is owned by Disney.

@ Charlie Spencer:
Felix Kjellberg (supposedly pronounced shell-berg), aka PewDiePie, is the sole owner and actor of the single largest channel in YouTube. With over 50 million(!) subscribers, he has a better reach than most TV channels.

The relation to Disney is that Disney bought a company that was sponsoring him. And then coerced said company to drop him. He’s still making millions, but that’s still a cheap shot from a mega-corporation.

@ Shu-Shu:
In all fairness, PDP has made a number of off-colour jokes and comments regarding Jews. It is not cherry-picking when you’re trying to show a /trend/. So, is he anti-semitic? Probably not, but he found an easy “joke” that riles people up and uses it frequently in lieu of humour.

Jews a folk that has suffered horrible persecution and even nowadays, are targeted by groups of people discriminating or hating on them on principle. Such behaviour must not be normalised or accepted as a matter of levity, especially when your audience is comprised of impressionable teenagers. So while I don’t think that he’s anti-semitic, I do think that he deserves every single consequence raising from the issue if only to discourage him and other people from normalising racial hatred and genocide.

On the other hand, I lament all the media exposure and drama that this got. It only has served to make PDP’s already devoted fans see him as martyr, basically encouraging him to side up with the guy that makes jokes about genocide against the society that says that that’s a poor thing to do. How many of those literal dozens of thousands of kids will grow to be blase about racial hatred or even contemplate whether there’s a point to anti-semitism (since it seems to get adults so riled up) is anybody’s guess.

Well, wired.com summarizes the problem a bit more thoughtfully, I think:https://www.wired.de/collection/life/you-have-responsibility-deal-it-open-letter-pewdiepie
(Btw: a German version is available there, too.)
But I don’t want to accuse this comic of being too superficial, as there is a nice subversive element in it that somehow went unnoticed by the comments so far:
So the guy doing the videos has a “vegetarian lifestyle”. Hm. And is happily announcing “Boom! Goes the cow!” Hm. Well.
Did Oliver want to show here between the lines how “It’s cute how young people still believe in the good in Youtube”? 😉
Maybe he was too subtle there for his audience?

@ Havuhk:
not quiet what happened and actually pewdie pie is at least partially reposible for this backlash. although I don’t believe he is a Nazi the way he joked about it was quiet offensive.
He had two very poor Indians danze holding up a sign saying “All Jew should die”, he paid them for this, they didn’t even understand what the sign said and needed the money. Then he said he didn’t expect them to do this but HE PAID THEM TO DO THIS!
He also had a Jesus impersonater who does stuff for money on the internet say that Hitler was an cool guy and did nothing wrong, again he paid this rather poor fellow to do so and aferterwards said he didn’t expect this!
I generally question the “I give poor people money to do stupid crap for my amusement” I find that alone distastefull -.- just because he has sooo much money that he can afford it. Sorry but that was NOT funny and people are right to call him out on that

Jeez, this comic… Again, taking shots at them social studies warriors out to take your vidya! Abooga-booga

I’m with @Bob, I have my doubts many of you read the article in question. You all do realize WSJ never accused Felix of being a nazi, right? That people cite this whole incident as evidence outlets like WSJ are unreliable is the most absurd part, in my opinion.

@Pylgrim Something to mull over, for sure. Yes, one can say bigoted things without themselves being a bigot, but the impact is all the same. Besides, Disney is understandably very skittish when it comes to associating with anti-semitism, what with, you know, Walt himself. Not to mention the sharp rise in vandalism and bomb threats across the US.

WSJ is unreliable. Back in the early Bitcoin days, I’ve seen them spread an obviously fake price manipulation message. This thing is named after a financial district! That’s the absolute last type of error it should allow. Remember that political opinions are much harder to analyze than cheaply fabricated news; it’s crazy to entrust the former to people who can’t manage the latter.

I’ve never seen a fully reliable news outlet. Even decent quality seems to be extremely rare. I can only think of The Economist, and maybe The Guardian, to prefer quality over making noise. (I’m not British; that’s a worldwide list, including German newspapers, none of which I trust in the slightest. Though I guess Switzerland’s NZZ should be given a chance.)

There’s no point in making a blacklist; it would be the default option to end up on it. Sandra and Cloud’s reaction is dead-on.

@ Missingnoleader@ SlugFiller:
Thanks. I didn’t know it was possible to make money off it, or that it had ‘channels’. I’m one of those old people whose primary use of YouTube is as an updated version of early MTV.@ Charlie:
I can’t tell if you’re serious or playing along with the comic. Is Double GameBro another Internet celeb I haven’t heard of?

I have to be honest here, and obviously I can’t speak for everyone, but a key part of Jewish humor is depreciation. If you look at a Jewish humor book you’ll see a lot of jokes along the lines of “How many Jews does it take to screw in a light bulb” and just like African Americans are known for making racist jokes towards each other, Jews do the same all the time. I remember going home and telling my parents that someone did the “pick up the penny Jew” joke to me sorta as an aside cause I told my parents everything those days, and they were horrified. And this is with a good number of my friends being non Jewish (though I do have a lot who are).

So yeah, I don’t get offended when people make Jew jokes. Because in the end, they’re just jokes. Mel Gibson’s Producer’s is hilarious, and I often find myself humming “Springtime for Hitler.” Borat is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I am fierce adherent to Sasha Baron Cohen. Both are Jewish by the way, and it shows because they pull no punches about it. And although Pewdiepie isn’t my sort of humor or genre of entertainment (a bit too slapstick for me) the shock-jock style of comedy pioneered first by Howard Stern will always have a place in my heart, and I think it’s necessary to make jokes about things that we are uncomfortable with as a society at large.

But the reason that I don’t get offended when people make Jewish jokes is because they’re intentions are often obvious to me. When someone tells me to pick up a penny it is never a stranger, but often a friend who I am very close with and have a positive history with. And it is obvious to me that Pewdiepie is very non-political, as it is very obvious when he’s making the joke format due to his exaggerated actions, and when he’s being dead serious. As someone familiar with that sort of humor there is no doubt in my mind that he is making fun of anti-semitism, since in my experience anti-semitism is often in a “preaching” sort of format in the style of a conspiracy theory. Unlike African American racism which has a history of being subversive through comedy, racism towards my people has always been through dramas and “non-fiction.” The fact that so many prominent Jewish comedies made fun of their faith and culture all the way back to the Three Stooges makes it obvious that the Jews were very much comfortable with their humorous depictions, and in our own strange way been controlling it through our own overzealous participation in mocking ourselves. I’m not aware of your background, maybe you are Jewish in fact for all I know, as I know that humor is often misunderstood if one isn’t familiar with that particular specific instance you are criticizing (my parents refuse to watch Borat all the way through for this reason, it’s too much for them given the current style of R rated comedy) but I am a little tired of people being offended for me, implying that jokes at our expense offends us when for a large number of us it doesn’t. And I hope that it is easier to be tolerant of this sort of humor when me, and five other people I can think of at the top of my head enjoy this sort of thing and have a legal right to immigrate to Israel.

So yeah, I don’t get offended when people make Jew jokes. Because in the end, they’re just jokes. Mel Gibson’s Producer’s is hilarious, and I often find myself humming “Springtime for Hitler.” Borat is one of my favorite movies of all time, and I am fierce adherent to Sasha Baron Cohen. Both are Jewish by the way, and it shows because they pull no punches about it.

Huh, reading the comments I gather that this was more directly inspired by some incident with some guy called PewDiePie and the Wall Street Journal, (which I had never heard about,) but when I read it there were like a dozen other stories it reminded me of.
Journalists try to defame a lot of people and groups these days. Their goal is to get people upset so they can sell more proverbial papers.
The first incident this reminded me of is all of the attack on Milo to call him a pedophile, when he was actually a victim of pedophilia.

MSM is dying. I’ve been talking about this for a while. I mean, someone like Bill O’Rielly only has 500K viewers for a given average episode, and he’s one of the ‘big’ fish. Even those numbers are pitiful compared to even moderately successful alternate media celebrities. So they are panicking and now lashing out with lies and yellow journalism. So sad.

@ Mxax-Ai:
Yep, pretty sure you managed to offend at least some victims in Germany 🙂 I mean, if we go by the theme of your post, the headline should have been the one that was actually used: “Cologne New Year Eve was uneventful!” Because remember how the police was determined to stay by the alternative facts for a few weeks?

@ Missingnoleader
@ SlugFiller:
Thanks. I didn’t know it was possible to make money off it, or that it had ‘channels’. I’m one of those old people whose primary use of YouTube is as an updated version of early MTV.

Yes, YouTube basically allow content creator to choose whether to allow ads to appear on their videos or not. Those that allow it can receive a percentage of the ad revenue. So it works a lot like public TV: People watch ads->video creators make money.

As for “channels”, any video on YouTube actually belongs to a “channel”. A YouTube user can create any number of channels, and upload videos to them. The video is associated with a channel, so people can easily find more videos of the same type by the same person.
Additionally, the “Subscribe” button under each video subscribes to the channel to which the video is updated. Being “subscribed” means that you can quickly view the latest videos from this channel by going to the “Subscriptions” page. You can also click the bell next to the “Subscribe” button to turn on “Notifications”, which means that whenever a new video is uploaded to the channel, you get an eMail about it. This can help you to watch new videos from the person as they are released. This is especially useful for news channels, where the content is relevant to the day it is released.

Since legacy media (TV, newspaper, etc) is killing itself with “news” stories like the one portrayed in the comic, it might be worthwhile for you to look for a few news channels on YouTube that seem somewhat reliable, and subscribe to them. This is the future of news.
And the longer you wait, the more saturated the market is going to become, making it that much harder to tell apart mostly-factual reporting from utter BS. If it’s not already nigh-impossible.

@ Shu-Shu:
The WSJ did not state that PDP was a nazi or fascist. They (accurately) reported what he said, the fact that he had done similar things several times before, and that he had attracted the attention and support of white supremacist groups. The sponsoring companies cut their support when they saw the content of Kjellberg’s “jokes”, which relied on the shock/ironic invocation of racism.